When it seemed possible Voyager would be returning home in early 2377 with the help of a Barclay hologram, he asked Seven of Nine what she would do when they returned. She said immediately get to work on repairs to Voyager, but Barclay told her there were people at Utopia Planitia to do the repairs - and that she should celebrate. (VOY: "Inside Man")

According to Ronald D. Moore, the production staff put starship models in Sisko's office to show his involvement with ship design. (AOL chat,1997) A subplot from "Paradise Lost" which never made it on screen had Benjamin Sisko sending Jake and Joseph to the fleet yards for safekeeping, the location chosen because he still had a lot of friends there.

The exterior view of the yard in "Relativity" was originally not intended to be shown on screen as the script only called for a shot of the Voyager in a drydock on its own. Many of the modelers at Foundation Imaging were fans and took a different view as Adam "Mojo"" Lebowitz explained:

"But when we got the script, we thought, "Well, we're going to build a drydock and we already have a library of other Federation ships, and making a Mars planet wouldn't be that difficult; it really wouldn't be much more expensive to create a scene of dozens of ships being built." So we suggested to the producers, "Hey, why don't we make a big moment out of this shot and show all the Utopia Planitia shipyards?" They said, "OK", so we eagerly went back into the office and created a temporary scene of what we had in mind with this big, big expanse. We used this big image map of the actual Utopia Planitia area of Mars that was recently surveyed by the Global Planetary Surveyor that NASA sent, and we showed it to Dan Curry and Ron Moore and Peter Lauritson and they liked it. Then they said, "While you're at it, why don't you add this scene and add some space stations back there?", and we said, "No problem." And of course the scene wound up turning into 10 times more work than we originally planned for, but we just wanted to do it. We wanted to see that on the air." (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 6, p. 50)

In the ENT series bible, the orbital Utopia Planitia facility was referred to as one of two main Starfleet bases as of 2151, the other being on Earth. The Martian outpost was also mentioned as a place where Charles Tucker III worked, prior to his assignment aboard Enterprise.